Marking bad HD sectors

I've seen this posted twice in other threads, but couldn't find it.  Oohh, hey look, IBrowse wraps the text now.  But I degress.

I've seen it mentioned that HDToolBox can mark off bad sectors.  I have looked but I don't see it.  Do I have to reinstall the drive to do it?  Won't that destroy the data on the drive?

Is there a non-destructive way to do that.  My current HD has an error in it that I can't even fit Sim City 2000 on it at this point.  

[blobrana]

Quarter-back tools will do that for you..

BTW all HD s are manufactured with slight flaws, so a new HD may have bad areas on the surface of the platters ( manufacture and economics)...

Quaterback will try to shift the data to a more reliable area and mark it as a bad sector.

i think i remember seing it at
http://nthdimension.emuunlim.com/

[Thomas]

You shouldn't bother doing that. If the drive is quite modern (more than 500MB) it probably has an internal error correction which maps bad blocks to an unused area. Once it starts presenting read errors to the user, the bad block area is full, which  means the drive is really heavily damaged and should be retired soon.

Bye,
Thomas

[iamaboringperson]

i think the HDToolBox on OS's < 3.5 had that
3.5 dont

it was one of the buttons on the front screen!

Hey all, thanks for the responses.  I'll try to answer in order.

#1 I wasn't able to find Quarterback tools on the cover disks at nth dimension, and SoftHut wanted $40 for it.  not really worth it for an ancient 500MB hard drive.  I'll keep my eyes open though.

#2 Well, as you saw this HD isn't too modern.  I used to have a 10GB drive, but it took a dive with an IBrowse 2.2 cache problem and can't even be partitioned anymore.  It had been having errors on the Windoze side before that though, so I'm sure IBrowse only finished off, not completely killed it.

#3 I went and dug out my 3.0 disks (since I use 3.9 right now) and found an old version of the toolbox that had said commands.  Thanks!  Of course, verify data said no errors found.  *shrug*  I'll just fill up the drive to the error again and then manually block off that section I guess.

Thanks for the help all.

[Vincent]

If you are formatting the HDD get MyFormat from aminet.  I use it to format floppies and have been able to use disks that can't usually be formatted using the standard format command.  I don't know what it's like for a HDD, but it's worth a try.  It can check sectors or tracks for bad blocks.

http://us.aminet.net/aminet/aminet.cgi?string=myformat